


a crowd-free caribbean getaway

by darcylindbergh



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Apathetic Villain Mary, Caribbean Getaways, Gen, Janine as Moriarty, Post-Episode: s04e01 The Six Thatchers, What To Do When You Just Faked Your Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 05:23:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15066074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darcylindbergh/pseuds/darcylindbergh
Summary: “I should have you shot,” Moriarty whispers in the dark, still laughing, though a bit more subdued now under the sheets. She wonders if Moriarty’s ever not laughing, if she laughs even when sheishaving people shot. “Sneaking off like this, betraying the plan.”“It was a bad plan,” she says.





	a crowd-free caribbean getaway

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Leslie @hudders-and-hiddles for the fast and dirty beta, as always.

She wakes up warm, crusted with sand and salt.

The birds trill carelessly in the trees, occasionally taking flight to ride the breeze; the waves surge along the shoreline, crashing over themselves, sweeping back out to sea with something like a sigh. _Sighs of relief,_ she thinks, stretching out against the sunbaked linen of the chaise lounge. _Everything here is a relief._

The shade has shifted as the morning creeps along, inching toward midday. She’ll burn if she stays out here much longer, but the heat has made her slow and pleasantly muzzy, and she can’t bring herself to move just yet. She can’t remember the last time she let herself drift like this. She can’t remember the last time she had the luxury of _slow_.

It has been the three longest years of her fucking life.

She closes her eyes again, and she breathes in.

*

It’s cooler inside the villa, even with all the doors and windows thrown open to the view of the lagoon and the surrounding gardens. She tracks sand in along the floors as she meanders through, stopping in the kitchenette for a glass of water before snagging a bottle of crisp white wine and a platter of cut fruit from the fridge and taking it all back out to set herself up on the covered verandah.

She cracks her neck, looking long down the expanse of empty, pristine beach. After London—chock-full of uptight arseholes and slathered in John Watson’s self-loathing to boot—the solitude is a blessing. She fills up the space around her all by herself, the air thick and humid with everyone she’s been and everyone she might yet be.  

It’s tough work to slough a person off, to relax her shoulders out from underneath the weight of an identity. It’s tough fucking work to get used to being herself again, to move back inside her own skin, shiny and new like the shimmery-silvery expanse of a scar. To breathe for a minute, before slipping back under the water.

She’s always been a bit partial to the Caribbean for these transitionary getaways, but she’s not picky. There have been overwater bungalows in French Polynesia, rainforest villas in Thailand, even mountainside chalets in the Alps. As long as she can be at peace for a moment, as long as she can be _nobody_ for a moment, it’ll do.

She might need a bit more than a moment here.

Three years is an insufferably long time to be anyone, really, and Mary Watson’s splintered identity had been an absolute pain in the goddamn arse: half one person, half another, layering in and out of some kind of split-personality scheme, a good-guy-bad-guy routine, always skating up against the person she might have been if she were ever really just herself.

There was a reason she did what she did and played the games she played, and _to be herself_ was not it.

She had made good time, in the beginning. John Watson had been a desperate, broken sort, and it had been easy enough to slip into his cracks and make room for herself there like so much good spackling, filling in the empty spaces and smoothing them over. In six months not only had she secured his confidence, but the ring on her finger gave her the power to move around his life, around all the people he knew, circling like a shark waiting for its moment—and then Sherlock Holmes had dropped out of an interrogation room and into a restaurant like a bow-tied engagement present. It had been _perfect_.

But when she had gone to make her contact, the contact hadn’t been there. Neither had the one after that. Nor the one after that.

A lot could happen to a network in six months, after all, and Sherlock Holmes had been destroying hers from the inside out for years.

Foolish. Jim had never been much of one for failsafes; he preferred to believe he was always right, and if one of his plans went wrong—and they did go wrong sometimes, the whole Adler debacle had been proof of that—he preferred to believe it wasn’t the fault of the plan, but the _person_. It would have been an infuriating quality in anyone, but in a Moriarty, it was a flaw that turned out to be fatal not only to Jim himself, but to the whole breadth of the network, leaving an agent like her out on a limb with no rope to bring her back in and nowhere to go even if she could’ve gotten there.

 _Men_ , she scoffed to herself. _No matter what they’re planning, no matter what side they think they’re on, they always think they’re infallible._

It had taken her a long time to sort out what to do next. A lot of waiting, and a lot of watching, and a lot of whispering, and finally the search had turned up a phone number to a Chicken Cottage franchise. “I’m looking for someone,” she’d said down the line. “I’m looking for the King.”

The bloke on the other end had laughed. “Been nearly three years ago now. You been out of town or what?”

“I _know_ what happened three years ago,” she had said, ignoring his question. She didn’t say that she’d been there: the less said about that the better. “I’m looking for the new one.”

“Ain’t a new one. The King is dead.” The bloke had laughed again. “Long live the _Queen!_ ”

 _Oh_ , she had thought, _oh,_ and when she’d finally managed to narrow down the where and the how and the why and the who, she’d been pleased—very pleased—to find a tall, dark-haired woman in a tidily tight plum dress standing in line at the Starbucks outside CAM Global’s London headquarters. “I keep telling myself I’m going to give this up,” she had said to the woman, stepping into line just behind her, letting her own pencil skirt and twisted-up hair make the implication for her, “but the canteen stuff’s shit.”

The woman had laughed, and even just in that glimmer of sound, she could hear the Irish lilting through. “Truly terrible stuff, isn’t it?”

She’d nodded. “Just awful. But the good thing about this Starbucks being right here is that you meet the best kinds of people trying to escape it.” And she’d leaned in, too close, getting the whiff of expensive perfume off the woman’s long, pale neck, to add, in a whisper gone rough with the need for privacy, “Long live the Queen.”

The woman had laughed again, and turned to get a proper look at her. “Oh, _well_ ,” she had said, overtly flirtatious, the flash of smile belied only by the threat in her eyes, “well aren’t _you_ something?”

“Anything you might ask me to be,” she’d returned, and the woman had laughed once more and put her hand over her wrist.

“How promising,” she’d said, and the Irish around her _r_ ’s had shone like a light around her: like a lighthouse in the storm, like a candle in the dark.

*

She had been much less a candle than a bonfire, weeks later, watching Sherlock Holmes and John Watson on some hacked CCTV feed as they crossed under the yellow tape of a crime scene. “Bring him in,” she’d said, and it had not been a suggestion. “Bring him in, where I can watch him lose it all right before I end it.”

“Anything,” she had responded, repeating her first promise, but somewhere in the dark of her mind the words caught on a rage beginning to brew beneath her breastbone: _what is it about him that holds onto people like that? What’s the big fucking deal?_

Of course, on some level, she could see the appeal. Dark hair, pale skin, a mouth like it were drawn by God himself and a voice like it came out of the depths of Hades: she might have tried it on herself, had she thought for even a moment that any woman could have done it. But even if it hadn’t been for John Watson, she knew better than to think any woman could’ve gotten that close, and it was astonishing to the point of _unreal_ that John didn’t seem to realise that. More than once she had seriously considered smacking the flat of her palm to John’s forehead and shouting, “ _He’s gay, John! He’s bloody gay! and he’s bloody well in love with you too!_ ” just to take the edge off.

But Moriarty had said no. “He doesn’t get to have _anything_ ,” she’d said. “Not even for a moment. There’s only one thing more dangerous than intelligence, love.”

She suspected she already knew, but she had asked anyway. “And what’s that?”

Moriarty’s eyes had blazed. “Hope.”

There wasn’t much she could say in response, but when John had come home a month after the wedding, hands clenching into fists, to ask whether she knew what Janine had been up to lately—in his _bedroom!_ in his _bath!—_ she thought maybe the time had come for her to stop waiting for the rope to bring her back in from this limb, and risk the drop instead.

*

Which had ended with three-day-old blood pooling up between John Watson’s fingers—she’d had to fight not to laugh, and he thought he’d be _divorcing_ her, of all things—and then, thirty-four hours and six flights later, here.

 _Not a bad place to end up_ , she thought, biting into a wedge of pineapple, watching the waves come in. The sun beat warm on the white sands, idyllic and peaceful; the days came and went in fiery sunsets and peony-pink sunrises. She had no schedule, no obligations. She did not even have a name, save for the one attached to the Swiss wire transfer, and the staff were not so stupid as to actually call her Ms. Lynd.  

She could choose.

She could become whoever she wanted to be.

Ironic: she’d spent the last year playing at someone who had made this choice already, and now that it was before her, she had no idea what she wanted.

She could go to America, spend some time losing herself in cities like New York and Los Angeles, getting to know the local power structures before insinuating herself into one or another or, if the fancy struck her, all of them. She could go to Paris or Barcelona and have a torrid affair or two, or she could take up official intelligence work again in Russia or South Africa or Venezuela. Perhaps she ought to finally do something with her undergraduate degree and chase elderly Nazi families down the Argentinian coasts; perhaps she ought to just take up with being Mary Watson in Toronto or Vancouver, nursing small children and randy old men with the same fake smiles she’s practiced hundreds of times in the last three years.

She could go home, even.

She laughs then, and shakes her head, taking another swallow of her wine. No: there are some places a new haircut and a new name can’t take you, and home is one of them.

*

Sometime just before the sun starts to set, a couple of broad-shouldered young men come from the main resort to set up a fire on the private beach, ducking their heads and calling her _ma’am_ as they clamber out of the Jeep with shovels and bundles of kindling. They’re quick and efficient, and it doesn’t take long for them to build the blaze. She thinks about flirting with them a bit, just to keep up her aura of mystery with the staff, but in the end can’t be arsed; instead she watches from a polite distance and waves them off when they’re finished.

She swaps the wine for some of the island’s local beer from the fridge—amber glass bottles that dew quickly in the evening heat, paper labels that smudge and smear at the slightest touch—and drags the cushions off the sun loungers so she can make herself a little nest in the sand. She digs her heels in, pushing through the dry surface layers, reveling in the cool damp of the deeper sand below.

The sunset is a gentle thing tonight, pale pinks and golds smearing away to the violets and indigos of evening. _Red sky at night, sailor’s delight_ , someone long ago used to tell her. It reminds her of apple orchards and corn fields, of peeling wallpaper and wooden spoons. _Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning._

 _What if it isn’t red at morning_ or _night, though?_ she wonders, but no one had ever told her that. No one ever told her about absence, about lack of, about what to do when there’s nothing to do, how to plan when there’s nothing to plan.

Maybe that’s why she likes it here so much: the reminder that there isn’t even a memory to complicate the empty business of being nobody.

*

The sun has long since gone by the time she notices someone coming up the beach, walking slowly and deliberately toward her little beacon of a firepit. It had taken her, perhaps, too long to notice; the beer had lulled her into a false sense of security, or the smoke had obscured her line of sight, or the figure had come too suddenly out of the shadows. Or none of those, and something else instead—she has a weapon within reach, but she doesn’t reach. She doesn’t need to.

She isn’t really all that surprised.

Moriarty is ethereal in the moonlight, she could grant her that, and it’s one hell of an entrance: walking with her feet just barely in the surf and wearing a plain white bathing suit, even in the chill of the night, with a length of sheer fabric tied low around her hips, her dark hair loose in the breeze, the moonlight reflecting from the ocean’s surface onto her pale skin in a sort of bluish glow.

She looks like a faerie, come to take her payment from the unsuspecting who’d promised more than they were willing to part with.

 _Like the fucking Shawshank Redemption_ , she thinks. _Following clues down to footsteps on the beach._  

But she sits and waits and doesn’t move; after all, she’s nobody now, and no longer has anything to give.

“Mind if I snag one?” Moriarty says, when she’s standing a mere four or five feet from the fire, gesturing down at the beers where they’ve been dug into a hole to stay cool in the sand. She shrugs; Moriarty pops the cap off one and slings herself down next to her.

It’s quiet, for a while. She sneaks another log onto the fire, scooting back away from the flying embers a little. They watch the wood crack and crumble, and no other shadows emerge from the dark to converge on her little hideaway. It could almost be peaceful, if they were not who they were, or had been, or would yet be.

“How did you find me?” she asks, half a beer later.

Moriarty laughs, that same familiar, liltingly Irish-laced laugh. “I think you wanted to be found,” she says. “You used one of Jim’s old trails, you know. They’re not so hard to follow once you know his pattern.”

Her nose wrinkles. “Didn’t think anyone was left to remember his patterns, I suppose.”

“Jim was a cad and a fool,” Moriarty says, her voice thick with affection, “but he could be good, when he wasn’t up his arse about Sherlock Holmes.”

“Everybody’s up their arses about Sherlock Holmes,” she mutters, her bitterness only just biting at the edge of her voice.

If Moriarty hears it, she doesn’t say; she only hums a little and lets the quiet stretch on again. The surf begins to pick up as the tide starts rolling in; the breeze picks up too, rustling the trees, crackling amid the burning logs. “Have you picked a new name yet?”

She drains the end of her beer, tosses the empty bottle to the side. Leans back on her elbows. “That usually depends on where I go.”

“I can’t exactly sit about here calling you Mary.”

For the first time since she got here, she grins. “Maybe I’ve gotten used to Mary.”

Moriarty laughs again. “I don’t think I’ll miss her, actually.”

She stares into the fire until her eyes begin to burn with the heat of it, wondering if anyone—if _anyone_ , anywhere—misses her.

It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t miss them.  

*

Together they finish the beers. Moriarty helps her douse the fire before they head back in for the night, leaving the empties lying in the sand; she changes into an old t-shirt while Moriarty makes use of the open-air shower in the side garden and gets into bed.

It’s so plush and soft that she’s already half asleep by the time Moriarty is pulling back the covers to slip in alongside her.

“I should have you shot,” Moriarty whispers in the dark, still laughing, though a bit more subdued now under the sheets. She wonders if Moriarty’s ever not laughing, if she laughs even when she _is_ having people shot. “Sneaking off like this, betraying the plan.”

“It was a bad plan,” she says.

“Maybe.” Moriarty rolls over onto her back, studying the ceiling. “Doesn’t mean I can afford to have agents abandoning things, though, just because they don’t agree.”

“I’d been three years in. I _married_ him, for Christ’s sake.”

“And had a baby. I admit, that was a bit more, mm, _enthusiasm_ than I was expecting. Tell me honestly now, though, was it really John’s?”

She snorts into her pillowcase. “Don’t be ridiculous. It wasn’t even _mine_.”

Moriarty shrieks and laughs and smacks her arm. “Seriously?”

“What?” she asks, pretending at innocence, but Moriarty’s clutching at her, gasping for breath, and it’s impossible not to dissolve into giggles with her. “Babies aren’t that hard to come by in a pinch. You didn’t really think I’d have a _baby_ , did you? There are limits. Besides, it’s ten to one that Sherlock will figure it out eventually anyway and send her back to wherever. I was surprised he didn’t before, actually.”

“He did bitch an awful lot about you not trusting him with it,” Moriarty confides. “He can really be an awful gossip if he thinks you’re just as bad. Surprisingly bad sense of self-preservation.”

“He’s too easy. Just a bit of _ooh, Sherlock, no need, darling, I know you’re terrible with children,_ or a spot of _mm, I don’t know, John, is Baker Street really safe for a baby,_ and he’s about ready to do himself in and finish the job for us.”

Across the pillows, Moriarty laughs in agreement, before slowing down to a smile. Her eyes are infinite in the dark. “But you left anyway,” she says, and there’s a hint of a question and a steel warning in her lilt now, and suddenly she remembers to be afraid. “We were so close.”

She shrugs, shifting the covers with her shoulders. “I left it wide open for the finish,” she says, a bit too defensively—she knows better, really, than to show even a second of second-guessing herself. At the very least, it’s not a professional look. “Sherlock’s taking the blame for my death, no doubt, and if I know John at all he’ll be pushing Sherlock away hard enough to skin his own knees on the effort. They’ll kill themselves by the end of the month.” She shrugs again. “Neater that way.”

“I didn’t ask for neat.”

“I didn’t sign up for three years.”

“You signed up for _anything_ , or was I mistaken?”

“ _You_ didn’t have to listen to John Watson wank over Sherlock Holmes in the bath once a bloody week,” she says dryly. “There’s only so much a girl can take. Do you know, I think he has a schedule— _doesn’t count if it’s a Tuesday_ , something like that.”

Moriarty giggles, but doesn’t reassure her. She sighs and goes on.

“I signed up for anything to get _out_. I wasn’t getting out. I was getting deeper and deeper, while you calculated, risked everything, _exposed_ me, and then left me there like so much raw meat set for the crows. I was lucky John didn’t kill me on sight. I had to get out when I saw the chance.”

She’s never been in a situation—interrogation? negotiation?—quite like this before: curled up together under the covers, the bare skin of their legs rubbing slowly up and down against one another. Moriarty’s hair is still damp, leaving a wet spot on the pillow. There’s a softness about it, the way only women can be soft even when they’re being iron and steel and bony teeth. An openness that only women can understand about each other—that it’s not weakness, this exchange of honesty, this give and take of vulnerability. It’s not fragility.

It’s the give and take of a warning without posture or performance—it’s the movement of the chess pieces with barely more than a breath or a blink.

It’s power.

If they were having any other conversation, she might be tempted to reach out and touch her.

Moriarty only watches her for a long moment, reading the game in her eyes and the twitch of her mouth. Then she sighs, rolls over onto her back again, her fingers catching and holding in the hem of her t-shirt. “I know,” she says. “Jim would’ve had you out ages ago. He did so hate when other people touched his things.” There’s a pointed look then, but she doesn’t flinch; she was never Jim’s in _that_ way. “And you’re right anyway. They’re perfectly poised for a good hard shove, and then it’ll be done. I just need one more thing from you.”

“To be the shove?”

Moriarty smiles up at the ceiling. “Don’t worry,” she says. “We can do it remotely. Just a few little home videos, you know?”

Her forehead creases. “That’s all? You came all this way for a few home videos?”

“No,” Moriarty says, and her laugh is back in her voice again. “I came all this way to threaten you, actually. Principal of the thing—can’t have anyone saying I’m going soft on anyone. You can tell anyone who asks that we spent a frantic evening together in the tub while I threatened to open all your veins and let you drown in your own blood, and you only just barely managed to convince me otherwise. Just for appearances, you understand.”

“Maybe I’ll even let you sneak in a cut or two,” she offers, just carelessly enough to show that she knows it isn’t really a joke. “Just for appearances.”

Moriarty looks thoughtful for a moment; one of her fingers slip over the thin skin of her wrist. “For appearances, then,” she agrees, then her face relaxes somehow and she giggles again, and then the interrogation-negotiation-conversation is over. “I also came to drink all your beer,” she declares with a grin. “Maybe go for a swim. Been a long time since I’ve been on holiday.”

“Well,” she says, letting out all the air that’s been stoppered up in her chest the last ten minutes, “then you’ve certainly come to the right place.”

 *

She learns how to be herself again, just a little.

She prefers sunrises to sunsets. Red wines, actually, to whites. Seafood over chicken, and chicken over pork, and pork over beef, and she doesn’t care for bananas or mushrooms or wild rice. She likes her baths scalding and her sheets cool. She likes her hair held back off her face and her toenails painted turquoise blue.

When she dreams, she dreams about wide open spaces.

“Do you think there’s something wrong with us,” she asks, early one morning, when she finds Moriarty sitting in the sand just at the edge of the surf, letting the waves roll in around her legs before receding back, “that it doesn’t bother us anymore?”

“Did it bother you in the beginning?” Moriarty asks, without needing to elaborate on what _it_ is. They both have seen the way a body bends before it breaks. They both have watched the way a body slows before it stops.

The sun is almost white on the water, it’s so crisp and clear. She’s wearing sunglasses, but it feels like the whole world is trying to look into her eyes. “Not particularly.”

Moriarty shrugs. “We do what we have to do to survive.”

“Not very many people have to do what we have to do to survive.”

“Not very many,” Moriarty agrees, “but there’s always someone doing what we do. Been that way since the beginning of time, really. It might as well be us.”

The water is cool when it rushes back up the sand, foaming gently around their knees and thighs. The smell of salt is strong in the morning air, like it cuts cleaner before the heat of the sun takes hold. “Do you ever think about getting out?” she asks.

Moriarty doesn’t answer for a long time. “I think there’s only one way out for people like us,” she says finally, and the memory of Jim, laughing and wide-eyed on a rooftop in the June morning, washes the end of the conversation away with the tide.

She heaves herself to her feet, wiping at the sand that sticks to her bum, and offers Moriarty her hand. “Let’s go in. I’ll scramble up some eggs, what do you say?”

*

When she wakes up from another afternoon nap and finds herself utterly alone, she knows its time to go.

Moriarty left nothing behind, as if she’d never even been, and that nothingness is the blessing she realises she’s been waiting for: the permission to start anew, to become something else. To be whatever she wants to be. The path to the way out, if she wants to take it.

The villa is strangely silent in Moriarty’s wake.

She watches the last sunset from the tiny window of a Cessna 206, bursting over the water in bloodied topaz and garnet as she leaves the island behind, no more than a waving speck of green and white in the never-ending expanse of the wine-dark sea.

 _Red sky at night_ , she thinks to herself, and she breathes out.  

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr!](http://www.watsonshoneybee.tumblr.com)


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